Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Photoshopping Your Property Photography

Before and After Real Estate Image Photoshopping

Currently, Real Estate and Property photography has become my bread and butter. So it's a good time to share some of what I know. I went over last week how to correct parallax errors, now let's get into making on that will really pop.

I included a YouTube Video of each layer of my photoshop document so you can see it build from the ground up.

Read on for an explanation!

Background Story: You can't always control the weather. When I was shooting this location it was overcast, and the sky-exposed image from this bracketed shot is still quite lacklustre so doing something new was in order. So the real estate agent I was working for felt the house was showing up a little weirder in colour in the photos, than it was in real life. We mulled over the idea of a quick reshoot at dusk, but we both still had busy schedules to work around. So, sometimes a photoshop revisit can work wonders and can save yourself a trip back to reshoot.

1. Start with the image you want to edit
2. Choose a background. Mine is a winter sunset, but its facing the appropriate direction. Sun was a little higher in sky during the real estate shoot, but this one should work fine.
3. The harder your shadows on the landscape your fixing, the more attention you'll have to pay to lighting of your background/sky image.
4. Masking the layer. After you have your background there, you need to make it loo like it belongs next. The best: quick select the bright sky around the house. Its okay if you don't get all the leafy stuff.
5. Layer mask that, should have a mostly decent sky. Then duplicate anything sticking into the sky, in my case, all the trees popping above horizon, duplicated. Turn the foliage layer to darken. With an appropriately bright sky, and dark leaves on trees, they should blend themselves over each other quite nicely, with no fine tuning needed for your layer mask selections. (AWESOME!)
6. Next, I decided the lights needed to glow since the black/dark windows weren't doing much if anything for the property.
7. It's starting to come together. Applied a violet photo filter to the whole image, to look more like there was some nice "sunsetty" purple glow bouncing off the sky onto the ground everywhere.
8. I made a quick and dirty depth map for the lens blur filter. I wanted the house to stay sharp, and take a little focus off all the excess stuff around.
9. That's pretty much final, added a little vignetting, and then brought into photoshop for some easy parallax adjustment, and that's what I like to call a finished image.